One of the serious problems facing the education system, particularly primary education, is the high level of repetition. Strangely enough, repetition maintains much the same qualitative weight in different educational contexts. Graphs 3.12 and 3.13 illustrate trend in the number of pupils passing, dropping out and repeating years in primary education.

In a series of 13 consecutive years the proportion of students repeating years in EP1 is invariably around 25% of the EP1 school population. The weight of repetition that occurred in a period of instability due to the war and the effects of PRE remained the same after the end of the war and in a period when the country's economy has started to show clear signs of recovery.

Although the indices of school waste are influenced by socio-economic variables that do not depend on the action of educational specialists, the decision as to whether the pupil passes the grade or repeats the year is the responsibility of the teachers. Thus repetition rates bear an intrinsic relationship with educational policies and practices.

The new basic education curriculum, designed in the context of the reforms advocated by the government's new strategic vision, proposes a complete seven-grade primary school, more
articulated and integrated from the point of view of content; it also proposes a profound change from a teacher-centred pedagogic practice to more active learning which regards the pupils themselves as the subjects of the process. To complement these measures in the scope of the new curriculum, learning organised in cycles is proposed, accompanied by new pedagogic and pupil assessment practices.

The language of instruction is certainly another problem that the Mozambican primary school must solve in order to improve its efficiency. This aspect is dealt with in Special Contribution 2, and in Box 3.6. As Joseph Poth, who is in charge of UNESCO's LINGUAPAX Project, has said, "an education that separates the child from the language spoken in his family, is one of the main causes of repeating years and dropping out of school." The results of research undertaken in Mozambique and in other countries confirms that the mother tongue is indeed the most appropriate medium for the initial years of a child's education.

But one can begin to envisage a scenario in which the continual expansion of the system will not depend only on supply: other social and pedagogic mechanisms will have to be set in motion to encourage demand in order to minimize the underuse of the existing units. Rather than continuing to sustain expansion by resorting to investments in the building of classrooms, the system will have to improve significantly its retention rate and reduce the number of repetitions, which are continuing to waste about 25% of the capacity of primary education.

From the organisational point of view, it can be said that the SNE is guilty of a structural distortion which is an assault against the dictates of the very law which advocates universal primary education.

Indeed, as Graph 3.15 shows, the system has a broad base in EP1, but is then abruptly narrowed in EP2, which is the second level of primary education. This is because of the organisational form of EP2, which functions by independent subjects, similar to secondary education. This makes it very expensive and difficult to expand throughout the vast national territory, because of the number of teachers needed for EP2 to function fully.

A further important constraint in the system is the irregular availability of school textbooks, which are indispensable tools in the teaching-learning process, and have a major influence on quality and efficiency. One of the concerns is the systematic delay in distributing books. The delays seem to arise from the inefficiency of the distribution system and from the fact that the books are printed outside the country. A possible solution to chronic delays would be to produce the books in Mozambique; not only would this make the distribution timetable easier, but it would stimulate growth of the national printing industry. Distribution is merely an internal problem, but printing the books inside Mozambique demands complex negotiations with the international
partners who fund the printing of textbooks.